Roland Kuit's Tutorial Review
Roland Kuit's Tutorial Review
Hoi Allemaal,
Ik ben nieuw op dit forum en dacht laat ik eens een review geven over de tutorial van Roland.
Hij is helaas is het Engels want ik heb em geschreven voor het Electro-Music Forum en aangezien ik nu een beste longontsteking te pakken heb, had ik geen zin om de boel nog eens te vertalen.
Ik had vorige week nog contact met Roland en hij heeft lekker zitten jammen in een cafe, waar hij, als het aan hem ligt, elke donderdag uit z'n dak kan gaan.
Het gaat volgens z'n laatste mailtje, dat was dus vorige week, wel beter met z'n hand maar het blijft een pijnlijke aangelegenheid.
Ik heb zelf een frozen shoulder en dystrofie aan mijn linker arm.
Dit loopt al 10 jaar en ik slik Oxycontin, Valium en nog meer vuiligheid.
Dit zal niet meer genezen maar de pijnstillers halen het scherpe kantje er van af. Roland heeft bij mijn weten geen zware pijnstillers (de volgende stap na Oxycontin is intraveneus morfine) en moet het doen met paracetamol en een goeie fles wijn, dat ie de laatste maanden toch die tutorial heeft afgekregen is echt te prijzen.
Goed, dat was ff een kleine detour. Ik heb zijn tutorial en dacht dat het voor sommige mensen wel interessant zou kunnen zijn om het een ander te lezen over die lessen.
Hi everybody!
I bought Roland's tutorial a while ago and decided to let you know what my thought were.
I bought several synthesizers purely because I knew they would produce the sound I was looking for.
The Nord Modular G2 was one of them.
Once in the studio I quickly became aware that to get real interesting sounds out of it you had to get your hands dirty.
I mean Clavia doesn't really ship their product with inspiring presets.
They actually want you to explore your purchase yourself, and there is something positive about that mindset.
Most of the synthesizers these days are packed full with amazing presets.
Just a touch of a button and you have the most atmospheric and complicated sounds ever.
But there is a downside to this, people tend to get lazy.
How many people really understand their instruments.
Back in the dark modular times if you wanted a different sound you had to totally alter the cable connections because there was no memory.
This was only possible if you knew what you were doing.
So I have a couple of synths that are fabulous but then I became seriously ill for years.
It turned out to be chronical and when I took my first step back into my studio after a long time, the knowledge
that I had was gone and eager to produce an album I wanted to get up to date again.
I first read a tutorial by Howard Scarr for the Access Virus series and after that I saw on the Electromusic forum that Roland Kuit had created a
tutorial for the NMG2.
I had tried some of the suggestions that I found on the forum, like buy the Arturia Moog Modular and the included book will help you with programming Modular Synthesizers. Well it did a little but it was an expensive lesson, $200 for a couple of pages that tell you how to create a patch.
OK, I have an awesome sounding Moog but if you can't program it the fun stops very quickly.
So I bought Roland's tutorial.
It's a HTML file on a cd and it comes with a demo version of the NMG2(Nord Modular G2) synth engine.
The history tour was worth the time especially because Roland has created links about the subjects to YouTube movies.
Giving you a very fun way to learn about an artist and you have many more links provided by YouTube to dig as deep as you want.
The Sound Synthesis chapters are great.
Instead of "How to create a MiniMoog or a Korg MS-20 with your NMG2" he steps through all the different ways of sound synthesis.
Many I heard of but you learn with examples made with the NMG2 how these different ways of sound synthesis work.
His way of teaching is pleasant and if you bother to try and recreate the patches you'll get a good understanding about all these different ways of sound synthesis.
Examining the patches is easy just click on the image and the NMG2 editor is automatically started with the patch ready to be studied.
I used Mozilla Firefox which directly let the Editor open the Patch. If you use Google Chrome the patches are first downloaded and you have to import each patch by hand which becomes a tedious procedure.
The next two chapters, "Dance and Trance" are all about creating patches involving drums, bass and chords.
The interesting thing here is that the NMG2 has it's own drum module but Roland rather wants you to learn how to put the knowledge from the previous chapters and put them to practice.
So be ready to patch a percussion loop in more than 4 or 5 ways. Sometimes it can be challenging but in the end it's quite rewarding to know how to create a complicated percussion patch with different ways of synthesis.
When you're designing your own sounds you will definitely use a combination of the many forms of synthesis.
Something what you will learn a lot during these chapters is the signalflow, Triggering, amplitude modulation, frequency modulation, logic modules and more.
There are some big examples but the main objective is to really understand what is going on.
Don't forget he put 28 years of experience into a tutorial, you can't expect to understand everything at once.
The next chapters dig deeper into subjects like ring modulation, logic circuits, audio processing and last but not least "Tips and Tricks".
I find this tutorial one of the best ways to get informed about the different ways of sound synthesis but also how to program a synthesizer.
In this tutorial Roland choose for the Nord Modular G2 but this knowledge can easily be used to program Reaktor from Native Instruments, my Virus or even Alchemy from Camel Audio.
It gives you a very firm foundation on which you can built your own way of programming sounds.
I must admit that sometimes you really have to go that extra mile to understand some subjects but in the end it's worth it.
Especially when you own a NMG2 this is a must. You'll be patching your own sounds now.
Patches that first were a complete mess of cables make sense now.
One thing that made me very happy was the fact that when I listen to a particular sound now I automatically begin to analyse that sound and I have the knowledge to reproduce that sound on my NMG2 or a different synthesizer the basics never change.
As I said a must for a NMG2 owner who wants to get more out of his synth instead of downloading someone else' patches.
And a good overview of the different sound synthesis and how to create them with a modular system.
I hope this will help you whether you should buy it or not.
Thanks for reading,
Pixie
Dat was het dan.
Ik ga gauw weer m'n bed in want ik wil graag mijn studio weer in. Ik heb grote plannen zeker na deze tutorial het is nu 04:32, tijd voor mijn medicijnen dan kan ik weer een paar uurtjes zonder pijn.
Roland, als je dit leest, wanneer stuur je die zip files op?
sterkte met je hand kerel!
En voor iedereen hier op het SynthForum.
Bedankt voor het lezen, ik hoop dat jullie er wat aan hebben.
groeten,
Pixie
